The Republic, the setting of the story, as it appears now.
Here is a little piece of the middle of Edmonton, turned on its side. To the people of the Republic, this map is oriented with North at the top, because they call upstream “North”, and because I’m writing the story and I like the map this way. So there.
By the time we reach our story, the river has eroded the banks significantly, and is much wider and moving more slowly. Most of the green space is now part of the very wide river. The people of the Republic are building their community from the scraps of the old, and the population becomes more dense closer to the river’s edge.
The wealthy fifth of the city that live in the West began building their community first around the University area (in orange), where a lot of buildings of stone and brick can be found still standing. Regan grew up in the core of this community, as the daughter of an important Elder, of the small but important middle-class clergy.
The very poor working class live on the East Side. Their lives exist to support the comfortable lifestyles of the Security, Clergy, and General Assembly who live in the West, plus a few Security who live in a walled Settlement on the East to enforce law, and Elders who teach at Academy, the school to which all young Westers are sent in early adulthood to learn their place in the class system of the West.
Academy is held in what we call the Legislature buildings. The walled Settlement is built close to Academy, facing its front entrance, on the site of historic Fort Edmonton (but they don’t know that).
Alecksey’s father lived in the densely populated and violent neighbourhood just outside the Settlement. He was a custodian for Academy, and worked long hours every night cleaning it. When she was young, he began stealing books and zines from Academy’s library for Alecksey, by which she taught herself to read (a privilege held only by the Elders). He stole records for her, for which she built a simple acoustic record player with instructions from a zine. The largest and most precious item he ever stole for his daughter was a typewriter, which she restored and learned to use with ink she made from charcoal.
Despite all he did for her, Alecksey hated her father. She hated their poverty. Living so close to the Settlement, she saw the abuse and oppression by the Westers among them, and the injustice of the inequality between her family and the people just beyond the wall. She saw her father bow and quake in submission, and dreamed of the day she would have an opportunity to do neither.
Alecksey ran away when she was sixteen. It wasn’t a clean break, but before her eighteenth birthday she had moved out all her things, and severed ties with her parents. By this time, she was living among the underground resistance, a group of rebels multiple hundreds strong and growing, living beneath the ground in the abandoned shafts of the old underground transit system.
Both Zac and Cal live nearer the far edges of the East. Zac has no permanent address. Cal grows a successful garden, a food forest that he’s cultivated and nursed for almost two decades, on a plot of land that Edmontonians now call Winston Churchill square. The remains of Edmonton’s City Hall pyramid and the Alberta Art Gallery are strange skeletons on the landscape surrounding the tiny farm. A small group has joined him, and share the food among themselves and with their neighbours. Entrances to the underground are overgrown and all around Cal’s little farm, so he is known of the underground resistance, but is not a part of it. Just beyond Cal’s place are the fields of opium poppies, from which come the drugs that Cal has used, quit, returned to, and been haunted by ever since his banishment from the West.
When Regan decided to leave for Academy early, at the beginning of her first Summer of adult sovereignty, she never imagined she’d make so fast a friendship as she would with Alecksey, nor how this friendship would so radically change both of their lives, and the whole structure upon which the Way of the Republic had been built.
